North Korea strongly condemned Japan on Monday for its attempt to lay territorial claim to the South Korean island of Dokdo, calling it an illogical, gangster-like act.

"Absolutely enraging the entire Korean nation is the gangster-like act of the Japanese reactionaries who, flatly denying the past crimes pending prompt liquidation, only makes far-fetched assertion that the land of Korea belongs to them," the North's official Korean Central News Agency said in a signed commentary, noting the Japanese foreign minister recently renewed his country's claim to Dokdo.

Dokdo Island (Yonhap)

"Tok Island is inalienable part of Korea both in name and reality," said the commentary, using the North Korean form of the name Dokdo. "Even key historical data and maps of Japan, to say nothing of all historical documents of Korea, specify Tok Island as Korea's. None of them found to have marked the islet as Japan's."

"If the Japanese reactionaries keep going reckless for overseas territorial expansion, defying repeated protest and rejection by the DPRK and other countries around it, they will face earlier isolation and self-ruin," it added, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. (Yonhap)